NonFiction

In the hospital, a few weeks before my grandmother died, she stopped speaking English. It was only French from then on, in whispers, through a ventilator mask. Colombe had never been a confident student of the English language, wading in only reluctantly after moving with her husband, my grandfather, across the country. Jacques worked in…

In retrospect, we were happy then, living, as we were, in the back of an old S.U.V., a ’92 4Runner with a rusting hood and newspapers taped to the windows. Ellen, my then-girlfriend, had been living in L.A. for a year and was just making a go in film. She’d done a few stints as…

A brief excerpt of this essay appeared in DUM DUM ZineIssue #5 in February 2015. A truck outside rattles through the intersection into the movie studio across the street. Unpleasantly warm breezes blow at me from opposite sides of the room. I can hear the bus arrive at the stop below my window: the…

She asked me, “Where are you from?” And I hesitated. I was born in New Jersey to Egyptians whose English was churned, but they knew how to say, “God bless America.” They had picked themselves up and moved across swallowing depths of water to breathe, moved across to a land where they believed the air…

Albertine bookstore is a Francophile’s paradise. Located just blocks from New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the shop is home to over 14,000 titles in French and English representing 30 French-speaking countries. French culture largely encompasses a global exchange of political and artistic ideas. Under the wing of the Cultural Services of the French…

On Bernal Avenue, a street belonging to a tidy suburb of San Francisco, the room is all-white. The only color is shouting loudly on a hanging canvas: green and yellow spatters. A piece of Mom’s. I think, I want to be her, with her wispy dark blonde bun and bony hands. On the chapped tips…

In 2007, when Leigh Stein was twenty-two years old, she met Jason at a Medea audition. He was spontaneous and charming, and the two quickly fell in love, abandoned school, and moved to Albuquerque. Albuquerque represented a land of sunshine, culture, and freedom. There, Leigh planned to write her novel while Jason worked, and eventually…

If you’re a contemporary art-lover and have been to New York City, it’s possible you have yet to discover Garis & Hahn gallery. Founded in 2013 and located in the heart of the Bowery, the “gallery-cum-Kunsthalle” engages niche and wide communities alike with diverse and conversational contemporary art. For the first time, the gallery is…

Never the same. Endless days of sun, nights of blood-orange sunsets. Some mornings new and rosy, some muted. Days of drought, wildfires, parched and shifting earth. Dark days of fog, rain and sliding hillsides. Crowded, curlicue freeways, deep and coyote-filled canyons. Disappearing cottages. Rising prices, mansions. Dreams as big as the ocean, christened by…

Seeing them anchored in Mexico City’s touristy Centro Historico I wanted to cry. Pulquerìas de la moda. Clean, smart, yuppie. Customers in button-down collars, shiny alligator boots. Trim-waisted women in tailored slacks. Bartenders accustomed to serving politicians, German tourists. Not the way they were during my student years in then less-than-respectable Colonia Escandòn. And not…